And the patent and lawsuit related news just keeps on coming. Sorry. Anywho, this one's a doozy. As we all know, Oracle - led by Larry Elison, who just so happens to be one of Steve Jobs' best friends, but this is of course entirely coincidental - is suing the crap out of Google over the use of Java in Android, claiming not only patent but also copyright infringement. Well, when Sun was still on its own, its CEO, Jonathan Schwarz, publicly and explicitly endorsed Android's use of Java in a blog post - a post that has since been removed by Oracle. But, as we all know, the internet never forgets.

I have a few-years-old-now Sony Ericsson K800i mobile phone which runs Java applets. There are many hundreds of Java applets available for the phone, including a surprising number of trivial games.

If back in the day Google had decided to have their applets for their new Android platform be compatible with this source code, then Android too would have to be able to run Java applets. If they had decided to do this, Google would indeed have had to license Java.

Google decided not to do that, they decided to go with a new VM which they called Dalvik. There were no Dalvik apps at all before Google made Dalvik.